Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/171

 CONSTRUCTION. 1 5 1 The total height of this Khorsabad wall was sixty feet nine feet for the foundations, forty-six for the retaining-wall, and five for the parapet, for the wall did not stop at the level of the roofs. A row of battlements was thought necessary both as a slight fortification and as an ornament. 1 These were finished at the top with open crenellations in brick, along the base of which ran apparently a frieze of painted rosettes. A reference to our Fig. 47 will explain all these arrangements better than words. It is a bird's-eye view in perspective of the south-western part of the palace. The vertical sections on the right of the engraving show how the stones were bonded to the crude brick. The crenellations are omitted here, but they may be seen in place on the left. The great size of the stones and the regularity of the masonry, the height of the wall and the long line of battlements with which it was crowned, the contrast between the brilliant whiteness of its main surface and the bright colours of the painted frieze that, we have supposed, defined its summit all this made up a composition simple enough, but by no means devoid of beauty and grandeur. In the enceinte surrounding the town, stone was also employed, but in a rather different fashion. It was used to give strength to the foot of the wall, which consisted of a limestone plinth nearly four feet high, surmounted by a mass of crude brick, rising to a total height of about forty-four feet. Its thickness was eighty feet. The bed of stone upon which the brick rested was made up of two retaining walls with a core of rubble. In the former, large blocks, carefully dressed and fixed, were used ; in the latter, pieces of broken stone thrown together pell-mell, except towards the top, where they were so placed as to present a smooth surface, upon which the first courses of brick could safely rest. 2 When Xenophon crossed Assyria with the " ten thousand," he 1 In every country in which buildings have been surmounted by flat roofs, this precaution has been taken " When thou buildest a new house, then thou shalt make a battlement for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon thine house, if any man fall from thence Deuteronomy xxii. 8). See also Les Monuments en Chaldee, en Assyrie et d Bab, m, d'apres les recentes d'ecouvertes archeologique, avec neuf planches lithographies, 8vo, by H. CAVANIOL, published in 1870 by Durand et Pedone-Lauriel. It contains a very good resume, especially in the matter of architecture, of those labours of French and English explorers to which we owe our knowledge of Chaldoea and Assyria. 2 PLACE, Ninive et I' Assyrie, vol i. p. 64.